Every summer, George W Bush's holiday reading is announced. This year Bush mockers have been given pause. The president has apparently just finished Albert Camus' famous tale of alienation, L'Etranger. (In translation, c'est vrai.) Not quite what we might have expected. One hungers to know what he made of the story of Meursault, a Frenchman living in Algeria, who shoots an Arab on the beach one day. The Arab has been in a fight with Meursault's friend Raymond, a local pimp, but our emotionless narrator tells us he pulled the trigger because of the irritating heat of the day, rather than for vengeance. He then fires four more times into his victim's body.

There seems a high voltage in the president's choice of a novel whose white protagonist murders an Arab. But Bush's reading of The Outsider was apparently notable for the intellectual debate it sparked with his aides. "He found it an interesting book and a quick read," said White House spokesman Tony Snow. "I don't want to go too deep into it, but we discussed the origins of existentialism."

Without going too deep into it, "existentialist" is probably not the right word. "Absurdist" seems closer to the mark. The universe is shown to be utterly indifferent, human institutions are founded on deception and hypocrisy and the nearest thing to a moral purpose the individual can find is mere truthfulness about this bleak state of affairs. It is not quite the American Way.

Surely liberals cannot wait to ask the president whether he believed it to be an indictment of capital punishment, as generations of A-level students have been taught. At his trial, Meursault is asked to say that he is sorry for what he has done and refuses, condemning himself by declining to tell a required lie. A death sentence is ensured by his reported behaviour at his mother's funeral. A witness testifies that he failed to exhibit any grief, proof, says the prosecutor, of his irredeemably callous nature. Camus summed up the novel's lesson in a single sentence. "In our society, any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death."

And the president's supporters on the Christian Right will surely be worried to hear of him dabbling in one of the most anti-religious of novels. After he is sentenced, Meursault is visited in his cell by a priest whose consolation he furiously rejects. Camus makes sure we admire his narrator's indignation at the illusions the chaplain peddles.

All this is disturbing proof that George W is not the weird being that we had all liked to suppose. A few months ago, Camus' novel came top in a poll conducted for G2 among male Guardian-reading types, who were asked what book had most influenced them. The Outsider beat off JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five to claim the distinction of the book most likely to have changed their lives. Oh dear. Perhaps, chaps, George is one of us.